Quotulatiousness

January 15, 2026

Having it both ways, thanks to the miraculous powers of “climate change”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Remember those news reports from a few years back, when the media urgently informed you that your home town was “warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet”? Sure you do, because every major outlet latched on to the idea and juiced it for that local angle. In the days before the internet and social media, it would have worked, too. This is an example of the amazing powers of climate change, but far from the only one. Apparently the wonders of climate change can both speed up and slow down the rotation of the entire planet:

Here is a headline from Forbes 4 August 2022:

Here, five short days later, is a headline from The Independent 9 August 2022:

It is possible to reconcile these two messages, if you are are dedicated The Science follower who greatly fears being called a science denier.

This is how: that on or before 8 August 2022, you swear the earth is spinning faster, and you say that any who doubts this is a troglodyte MAGAtard, and that 9 August 2022 and after, you swear the earth is spinning slower, and say that any who doubts this is mouth-breathing redneck.

The Science is self-correcting in this way.

Now what is amusing about this is not the hubris and over-certainty of scientists, which because scientists are people have characteristics in them no different than in non-scientists. What matters to us are (a) the alleged causes of the changes in rotational speed, and (b) AI.

[…]

I have been trying, with little success, to explain that AI is programmed to be sycophantic, to give users a feeling that what they (the users) believe is right, and that they are right to believe whatever it is they want to believe. Press any of these AI models strongly and consistently enough, and you can get them to “admit” just about anything — that they haven’t been hard coded not to notice. DIE is still with us, even, or especially in, AI.

AI has sworn that earth is both speeding up and slowing down, promising both were true with searches I did (for the article titles) separated by less than a minute.

Now this is partly to blame on the training material, because scientists themselves are claiming the same things AI found. Which brings us to the alleged causes of both.

Climate change.

Well of course it was climate change. Climate change, as we discovered earlier, is responsible for all things on earth. All bad things, that is. Climate change simultaneously causes earth to spin both slower and faster. Climate change is therefore a branch of quantum mechanics, where outcomes both happen and don’t happen, depending on which scientist is looking.

January 13, 2026

“In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray was travelling the other day and therefore subjected himself to watching the “news” on television. He now relates “the Fall of Soygon” from that painful experience:

Minneapolis is [Current Thing], and a significant part of the population is for that. Standard reference, insert own text:

BLACK LIVES MATTER FREE PALESTINE NEW PROGRAM LOADING.

The point of the performance is the performance, like art that exists only to comment on the meaning of art. They’re borrowing: “Hence, once again, pastiche: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum”.

I’m briefly on the road in California, and watched television news last night. A protest in Fresno stood up to those bastards from ICE, who embody American imperialism and also something that George Orwell told us, details unclear. But then, almost inevitably, a protester told the television camera that he also marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, and now he’s protesting again against the Trump administration and all its enablers, “who are trying to take our country away from us”.

Of course, something something Selma something something. “Selma envy”, the performative seeking, the wish to be a soldier in a great cause: insert great cause here. George Wallace was apparently also opposed to widespread Somali social welfare fraud, the great beating heart of the Civil Rights Movement. All causes are the same cause. “I’m against this situation that is happening”, the protesters explain. Arresting someone who has a deportation order is functionally identical to beating people who march against segregation, because in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles. Monday, rage in the streets, Tuesday, rage in the streets, Wednesday, rage in the streets …

The Minneapolis circle jerk is producing endless video of middle-aged white leftist women doing THE SAME performance, endlessly, like there are a thousand pieces of footage that all show the same moment with different faces. Here, go watch one. Come back when you’re done.

Update, 15 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 12, 2026

Britain’s new “war against misogyny”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage explains how a Netflix show ended up as a key exhibit in the British chattering classes’ latest crusade:

Under our Labour government, the dictionary of euphemisms has swollen to rival War and Peace. Each day mints a fresh brick of Lego Language — words pressed together into sentence shapes that feel moral without actually meaning anything. Euphemism is not just annoying speech; it is a habit of mind. The mouth that traffics in euphemisms aligns with the mind that thinks in euphemisms too.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Labour’s declared War on Misogyny. According to our betters, Britain is a scorched plain over which misogynists roam, knuckles dragging, hypnotised by Andrew Tate and the Manosphere. These creatures, we are told, stalk the land, muttering statistics about male athletic advantage like a swarm of demented Daleks.

Our Labour government, its approval rating currently three percent lower than the percentage of Brits who believe there is a monster living in Loch Ness Lake, will train teachers to spot misogyny in boys and send “high-risk” offenders to courses to “tackle the root causes of misogyny”.

Misogyny, however, is not a vibes-based category. The word comes from the Ancient Greek misos (hatred) and gunē (woman): hatred of women. Until recently, it described a pathological condition involving fear, control, and violence directed at women. Such brutal men exist. They always have. But are they representative of the average British schoolboy doom-scrolling through social-media nonsense? Press X to doubt.

Yet this is where the campaign now lands: in classrooms of adolescent boys, taught to interrogate their latent depravity before it has manifested. It is not behaviour being punished, but probability.

In a culture strapped to the algorithm, only the most extreme definitions float to the surface. The brain, trained by screens, learns to seek the sensational, the novel, the ludicrous. And so, Labour shapes its moral imagination on content rather than evidence.

The Netflix drama Adolescence perfectly captures this drift. For the unacquainted, the series — an incel murder story drugged liberally with “that Andrew Tate shit” — was received as revealed truth. For The Guardian, it was “the best TV show ever”. It was not. Even a semi-literate eye would charge Adolescence as, well … adolescent.

Nevertheless, Adolescence assumed the status of revealed truth. On a BBC news panel, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was interrogated for admitting she had not yet seen it. Middle-class parents dutifully watched alongside their sons, scanning their offspring for signs of misogyny leaking from its gills. Fiction hardened into diagnosis.

Life now imitates social media. Labour’s plan to tackle misogyny appears lifted directly from the website formerly known as Twitter. Schools will teach boys that it is not acceptable to act like barbarians. One wonders who imagined otherwise.

What these awareness seminars will not address — naturally — are the forms of misogyny that are neither hypothetical nor algorithmically inferred, but routine, organised, and existing beyond a Twitter feed or a Netflix menu.

They will not dwell on forced veiling, female genital mutilation, so-called honour violence, or acid attacks — practices documented in Britain and overwhelmingly concentrated within small but electorally critical communities governed by brutal patriarchal codes.

A rational observer might reasonably conclude that such practices meet any serious definition of misogyny: not ironic hatred, not incel posturing, but actual coercion, violence, and control exercised over women’s bodies and lives. You know, the very domination that Iranian women (and men) are currently risking their lives — quite literally — to uproot.

Yet these realities remain untouched and unmentioned, whilst classrooms revert into courtrooms enlisted to pre-emptively correct the imagined sins of adolescent boys. The reason is not moral complexity but political convenience. Euphemism thrives where naming the problem would threaten electoral arithmetic.

And so, the language grows ever softer around real brutality, even as it hardens against boys whose only crime is to physically resemble a fictitious incel murderer on Netflix.

QotD: The death of satire

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The English comedian, Harry Enfield, made a return to the BBC between 2007 and 2012. Compared to his more observation-based comedy in the early ’90s, there was clearly a more reactionary turn in his 2000s work. Targets included a multitude of establishment celebrities and pompous television presenters, Eastern European immigrants, the band U2, and, most brutally of all, upper-middle-class liberals.

Enfield was doing what all court jesters should do: delivering uncomfortable truths to those in power. The jester’s often painful or embarrassing jibes can be taken in good faith and acted upon, ignored, or worse. The idea is to convey what everyone outside the court is thinking and how the ordinary person perceives those with power and influence. While Enfield’s work of this era certainly merits a more focused analysis, here I’d like to zoom in on one sketch based on a favourite Enfield target, the show Dragons’ Den.

Enfield excoriates the ludicrously pompous panel of wealthy, high-status business owners and their seeming right to supreme arrogance justified simply by their wealth. In one skit, Enfield and Paul Whitehouse arrive to pitch an idea as bumbling English entrepreneurs trying to get the “Dragons” to invest in their concept called “I can’t believe it’s not custard”. The Dragons, also played by Enfield and Whitehouse, sneer and spit venom at the Englishmen and their stupid idea, swiftly sending them away with no investment whatsoever.

The two white men later return, adorned in black-face and Jamaican accents with a pitch called “Me kyan believe it nat custard” and the Dragons fall at their feet, showering them with money. They then begin to compete with each other in sycophantically grovelling, fearful that the least enthusiastic of them will be deemed racist.

The sketch hits like a thunderbolt because Enfield holds up a mirror to a particular class of people, saying, “This is what you are!” We, as the common folk, take great delight in this lampooning because we know it to be a painful, somewhat grotesque truth. In an ocean of noise, it is a clear, bright signal that something is not right.

It is both a commentary on multiculturalism and a critique of those with power and influence. Yet, for some reason, this sketch lands harder than, say, a Spitting Image sketch in the 1980s targeting Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. There is a sense that an agreed-upon lie is being teased out into the glare of daylight and unceremoniously prodded and kicked about. The morality of the pretentious Dragons is a sham, and as such, their status is deflated before us.

Enfield revealed, in that single clip, the inherent fragility of the managerial classes dedicated to propagating via “virtue signalling” the values of the multicultural state. The millionaires of the Dragons’ Den panel adopt the attitudes and worldview of brutal free-market meritocrats, with the only subject of interest to them being whether or not a product or service is worthy of investment. Enfield implied that this worldview was a lie, a charade, and that they were no more outside of the central multicultural metanarrative than a Guardian journalist. The Dragons’ Den panel, and therefore neoliberalism, was not an alternative or competitor, but rather subordinate to the politically correct dogma of the age.

From the perspective of Britain’s liberal elite, Enfield committed a multitude of sins against them and their values, which probably explains why, after his show was shuffled off to BBC 2 to die, they never allowed themselves to be confronted with such lampooning ever again. The external frame from which people can gaze back into the general narrative would be kept permanently locked out.

Yet, this also marked a transition from a Blairite neoliberalism, in which the justification for mass immigration was to infuse British society with fresh energy and dynamism, into a more stagnant form wherein the upholding of the multicultural order became its own justification.

Morgoth, “How Multiculturalism Consumes Everything”, Morgoth’s Review, 2025-10-04.

January 11, 2026

Iran in the news

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There’s a major upheaval going on in Iran, but the western media seem to be incapable of covering it with any depth — or in far too many cases, at all — even though it’s exactly the sort of thing they used to be very interested in. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tahmineh Dehbozorgi provides useful context:

The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world.

Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life — speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival — under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime.

Western media refuses to do so because it has fundamentally misunderstood Islam. Or worse, it has chosen not to understand it.

Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people”, Arabs, or “the Middle East”, as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine.

This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs”, “all Arabs are Muslim”, and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers”. Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture — Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable — are erased.

By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them — or ignores them entirely.

There is another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media is economic issues.

As you know, Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalized or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government’s dark void of empty promises.

Covering Iran honestly would require acknowledging that these policies are harmful. They have been tried. They have failed. Catastrophically.

This is deeply inconvenient for Western media institutions that routinely promote expansive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism. Iran demonstrates where such systems lead when insulated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It shows that when the state controls livelihoods, non-conformity becomes existentially dangerous. That lesson cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas in softer language.

Western liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white. Iranian protesters do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape.

That is what terrifies Western liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored.

So the silence continues.

John Cleese:

On Substack Notes, Fergus Mason shares what might be the most iconic photo of the young year:

Update, 12 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 5, 2026

International law is more like International “law”

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Konstantin Kisin points out that calling it “International Law” gives it a semi-mythic quality that it absolutely does not deserve:

All the bleating about “international law” shows just how completely deluded some of our elites have become.

International law was a pleasant fiction that lasted for a few decades. It was never real and now the world has reverted to its default setting: Great Power politics.

This is why, as a strong Ukraine supporter, I have never talked about international law or called Putin’s attack an “illegal invasion”.

Laws are based on submission to an overarching authority backed by force. There is no such international authority and even if you view the UN as one, it does not have the ability to use force against those who violate “international law” other than against small countries with weak militaries.

When the US attacked Iraq, the UN did nothing.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the UN did nothing.
If China invades Taiwan tomorrow, the UN will do nothing.

If you cannot enforce a law, it’s not a law.

I do not support Ukraine because naughty Vlad broke the rules. I support Ukraine because it’s not in OUR interest in the West to have Russia marauding its way through friendly countries on the borders of Europe. It’s in our interest for us to be as strong as possible and for our adversaries to be as weak as possible.

President Trump is a realist and a pragmatist. He sees through the fictions other “leaders” cling to.

A good leader advances the national interests of his country. If more Western leaders did this, our civilisation would be in a much better place.

I commented on another post that,

For a lot of people (Canadian Liberals and American Democrats in particular), the invocation “international law” has a mesmerizing effect on their ability to reason [insert usual disclaimer that if they could foresee the results of their enlightened beliefs, they wouldn’t be progressives]. They seem to have a quasi-religious belief in the UN as if it were some kind of God-given supergovernment that is always right and must always be obeyed. “World opinion” might as well be the hand of God to them, so any time the legacy media can portray the US (and Trump in particular) as going against “world opinion” they want to get out the sackcloth and ashes … or sack a city and turn it into ashes, whichever comes first.

vittorio analyzes the default position of most progressives on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

most political issues nowadays can be explained by understanding that american leftists dont have positions, they have oppositions.

their entire belief system is defined by negation of whatever the right supports. this is why portland chants “free maduro” while actual venezuelans celebrate in the streets. they’re not pro-venezuelan or pro democracies, or pro tyrant, or pro maduro, they’re simply anti-american-right.

they’ve outsourced their worldview to institutional narratives for so long that genuine self-reflection would require questioning everything. for them it’s much easier to just oppose. the beliefs arent coherent because they were never meant to be coherent. they only need to signal tribal membership, and leftist membership is gained by opposing the right.

trump does X? the left screams and cries because they wanted Y

trump does Y? the left screams and cries and riots because even if they said they wanted Y, what they meant is that X was the way to go

trump cures cancer? they’ll argue that the cancer cells are alive have a right of free determination

trump saves lives? they’ll protest because somehow those lives didn’t matter and should have been ended

no coherent word model. no logic. pure opposition

at some point you just have to stop engaging with it as if it’s a real political position. it’s not. it’s aesthetic opposition wearing the costume of ideology

As Severian at Founding Questions often remarks, progressives’ core belief is The Great Inversion: “whatever is, is wrong”.

Bingo Bobbins makes the case that “International law is fake and gay”:

Was this operation necessary? Was Maduro really a “narcoterrorist”? I admit that I haven’t really been following all the drama with Venezuela recently, but my intuition is that Maduro was probably accepting bribes to look the other way with regards to drug trafficking, rather than being directly involved. And sure, he was a socialist dictator but there’s plenty of those around. The US doesn’t go and topple dictators unless there is a perceived US interest in doing so.

What Maduro was actually doing was cozying up to China. In fact, he had just finished a meeting with some Chinese ambassadors hours before Delta Force snatched him up by the scruff. This was actually a warning to China not to mess around in our hemisphere. The Trump administration is re-establishing the Monroe Doctrine, or, as he recently called in a press conference, “The Donroe Doctrine“. As far as I can see, this is completely in keeping with my preferred Vitalist Foreign Policy.

You can agree or disagree with this show of force, but please don’t whine to me about “International Law”. International Law is fake and gay. I certainly don’t care that the Trump administration “targeted a political leader”. This is the complaint being leveled by many leftists in regard to the operation. Really, this is just because leftists are anti-American third-worldists, and they are filled with butthurt because “their guy” lost. But, let’s examine this “rule” of not being allowed to target a countries rulers, because it’s particularly ridiculous.

If you have a problem with a specific country, who do you really have a problem with? You have a problem with that country’s leaders, since they are the ones making the decisions. Why wouldn’t you target the leaders? The only reason is that all the leaders from all the countries got together and agreed that they wouldn’t target each other. They would rather resolve their differences by throwing cannon fodder at each other, while keeping themselves off the table. And sure, I understand why that is great for them, but not why it would be great for me (or you).

Of course, the CIA has been ignoring this “international law” for decades, but they’ve been doing it in a very effeminate way, skulking about the world, funding Color Revolutions and clandestinely arming insurgent groups in order to subvert existing regimes. The Donroe Doctrine is much better. Imagine if the Trump administration had tried to handle Maduro the way the Obama administration tried to handle Assad. Fund a decades long civil war, accidentally establish a caliphate, fight a war against said caliphate, facilitate the deaths of tens of thousands of Christians, all to have an even worse dictator eventually rise to power.

Update, 6 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 30, 2025

Childhood’s End (Youtube Copyright Edit)

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Media, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 30 Jul 2024

The 2015 adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End has a lot going on. But Youtube won’t let me use clips from it, so here’s a stills-only recut covering the major points. A far superior cut is available at my Patreon page, along with a few other exclusives in what will surely be a growing collection of Youtube no-nos.

🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian

December 19, 2025

The strange rebirth of English patriotism

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Conservative Woman, Niall McCrae discusses what he calls “a new crusade” as the downtrodden English rediscover — or in many cases, discover for the first time — patriotic feelings for their nation, and earn the scorn and contempt of the ruling class and their media fart-catchers:

“Union Jacks and crosses of St George” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

A wave of patriotism swept across England last summer. Flags were tied to lampposts up and down the country, but while these displays had wide public support, the intelligentsia were troubled, particularly as the colours were often flown in areas of cultural diversity or on roads passing hotels accommodating illegal immigrants. This suggested provocation, rather than the use of national flags to celebrate sporting success.

Politicians and Guardian commentators were careful not to appear too negative, but they emphasised unity and inclusion over nationalistic fervour. The Union Jack was preferable to the St George’s Cross, because they associated the latter more with the far right (this is not accurate, as groups such as the National Front and BNP rallied under the Union Jack).

The Union Jack (properly termed “flag” as a jack is hoisted at sea), comprises the crosses of St George, St Andrew and St Patrick. It is perhaps the most impressive flag in the world, a classic design of great cultural impact. How globalists, the EU and Islamists would like to banish it!

The “Unite the Kingdom” march led by Tommy Robinson in September, which brought a million people to the streets of London, was a marvellous spectacle of patriotism. For the counter-Jihad movement, conflict in the Middle East is regarded as an existential struggle against militant Islam. Israeli flags are often waved towards pro-Palestine marchers, and the London rally gave several Zionists a platform at Whitehall. However, the vast majority of marchers were there for one country only – their own. This was truly a British event, with a roughly equal mix of Union and St George flags, alongside some Welsh dragons and Scottish saltires, and Irish tricolours too.

Significantly, there was another symbol prominently at the London march: the Christian cross. A poignant moment was at the ramparts of Westminster Bridge, where a fearless young man mounted the head of the stone lion and from that precarious pedestal raised in one hand the flag of St George, and in the other a wooden cross. (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOpagGvkQk9/)

I first observed the resurgence of Christian faith at the huge protests against the Covid-19 regime. Several marchers bore crosses, or placards asserting the power of God over earthly evil. The Book of Revelation was quoted, and when the “vaccine” was launched it was cast as the “Mark of the Beast”.

Socially unacceptable they may have been, but now St George and Christian crosses are regularly appearing together in gatherings for patriotic or traditional causes. In his book Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags (2017), Tim Marshall observed that “with the rise of Islam in Europe, these symbols are likely to be increasingly used by the far right to try to define the continent as what they think it is, and in opposition to what they think it is not”. You can’t get a book released by a mainstream publisher without expressing such approved outlook, but Marshall is making the mistake of blaming patriots for the devaluing of their national flag; it is surely the subversive ideology of the progressive left that has taught generations that national pride is regressive and bigoted. Meanwhile “woke” warriors are not shy of waving the Pride rainbow, transgender stripes and the flag of Palestine. And the likes of Hope Not Hate had no complaint about huge fascist-style marches awash in the blue and yellow stars of the EU.

December 17, 2025

“The core hypocrisy of modern Western governance”

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Marazzo discusses the extremely weird experience we’ve all lived through since 9/11 in almost every major western nation:

For more than 20 years, Western governments told their citizens that Islamist extremism posed an existential threat. Entire generations were sent to fight the Global War on Terror. Soldiers were killed, families were broken, civil liberties were curtailed, and trillions were spent, all justified by the claim that terrorism had to be stopped over there so it would not reach us here.

Then something strange happened.

The same governments that built their legitimacy on that fear now insist that even discussing the cultural, security, or integration risks associated with mass immigration from unstable regions is immoral. Raise concerns and you are no longer a citizen asking questions, but a bigot, an extremist, or a threat yourself. In some countries, speech alone now draws police attention, while violent acts are reframed as isolated incidents or stripped of ideological context.

The irony deepens when you look at the timeline.

During the first years of Covid, terrorism all but vanished from news coverage, just as Covid seemed to erase the common cold, cancer, and every other cause of death from public discourse. Nothing had disappeared. The narrative had simply changed. Attention was redirected. Fear was reassigned.

Now, as governments pursue aggressive mass immigration policies, the public is told that questioning outcomes is unacceptable, even as the very threats once used to justify war reappear domestically. The message is clear and profoundly cynical: the danger was real when it justified foreign wars, but discussion becomes forbidden when it complicates domestic policy.

This is not tolerance. It is coercion.

And now comes the final insult.

The same political class that demands silence at home is preparing to demand sacrifice abroad. The same citizens who are told to accept social breakdown, rising crime, collapsing services, and cultural fragmentation are being told they may soon be required to fight Russia to “defend our way of life”.

What way of life, exactly?

The one being systematically dismantled by the very governments issuing the call. The one they are actively transforming into something unrecognizable through reckless policy, moral intimidation, and managed decline. They are asking people to die for values they no longer practice and for societies they are actively degrading.

This is the core hypocrisy of modern Western governance.

We were told to fight, bleed, and die to defend liberal democratic values. Now we are told those same values require silence, compliance, and obedience, while our countries are reshaped without consent and against the will of the people who built them.

A government that suppresses debate at home while demanding loyalty abroad is not defending democracy. It is consuming it.

And history is not kind to regimes that ask their people to die for a future they are busy destroying.

December 2, 2025

Dead Wrong: How Canada got the Residential School story so wrong

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Juno News shares Candice Malcolm‘s foreword to Dead Wrong by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan:

Canada is off track. We’ve lost our way.

How else could we make sense of the moral panic produced from a half-baked report coming from a small Indian Band in Central British Columbia in the spring of 2021? In response, the country lost its mind. Following reports of 215 “unmarked graves” at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School, the supposedly trusted sources of our society – journalists, elected officials, academics and so-called experts – reported fiction as fact, without doing any due diligence or research into the still unproven and questionable claims of mass graves and secret midnight burials of hundreds of deceased children.

A failure of this magnitude doesn’t happen instantaneously. It’s built over time as those who profess to speak the truth deliver deception, doublespeak, and misinformation – all in the name of addressing some grievance, advancing an agenda, and creating a narrative.

The only conclusion we can now draw is that our country is not what it should be, not what it was.

There are a myriad of complicated reasons to explain our clear downward trajectory – institutional capture, a hard-left consensus among political and cultural elites (driven in large part by government-funded journalists and the state broadcaster pushing woke propaganda), a large and inefficient bureaucracy that stifles growth and

innovation, institutions built upon a moral code that became unfashionable, and so on.

Canada has become a feminist country that proudly discriminates against men and diminishes the role of mothers. It has become a post-national country that loathes its founders and openly discriminates against individuals based on skin colour. It isn’t just post-Christian, it’s anti-Christian – evident from the treatment of Evangelical prayer leader Sean Feucht, the coordinated attacks against him in the summer of 2025 and the cancellation of tour stops across the country, not to mention total disinterest and cover-up of the 120+ churches that have been decimated and destroyed in the wake of the unmarked graves fiasco.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed our country fall from a functional system, into something almost unrecognizable.

The Canada I grew up in was safe, stable and secure. We knew our neighbours, we trusted institutions and didn’t worry too much about politics. Being Canadian meant something. We had a community, an identity, a shared purpose. Most of us believed in upward mobility and the Canadian dream: that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will have the same – or dare I say better – opportunities and quality of life than your parents.

This is clearly no longer the case for most Canadians under the age of 45, and that is a major problem for all of us.

I came across a simple social graph by William Meijer that clearly explains what has happened better than anything else I’ve seen. You could apply this to countries, companies and even personal relationships.

Simply put: kindness got in the way of truth.

Meijer writes the accompanying caption: “An extreme commitment to the truth makes relationships acutely dysfunctional but systems chronically functional (think Elon Musk).

An extreme commitment to kindness makes relationships acutely functional but systems chronically dysfunctional (think Sweden, UK).”

Canada perhaps represents the “kind dysfunction” better than any other place.

November 27, 2025

Lack of talent is no obstacle to music success … even before Auto-Tune

Filed under: History, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the reasons I like Ted Gioia’s Substack is that even when I’m not overly interested in the topic of any particular post, I usually learn something:

I’ve tried to identify the turning point — the moment when the rules changed. By my measure it happened one night in 1958.

Let’s revisit that fateful day …

One Friday evening in 1958, record producer George Avakian sat down in front of his TV set, and watched an episode of the popular detective show 77 Sunset Strip. This chance incident would have surprising ramifications in the music business for decades to come.

A few minutes into the episode, the record producer decided that one of the actors on the show looked and talked like a rock star. His name was Edd Byrnes and he played a hipster character named Kookie.

Kookie parked cars at a Hollywood nightclub in the show, and acted very cool. He had the right look and said witty hipster-ish things. The TV audience loved him, especially younger viewers.

Check Kookie out and decide for yourself.

There was just one tiny problem. Byrnes wasn’t a musician.

But Avakian didn’t worry about this. “I was sure that kids would like his talk and his looks, especially a way he had of looking out of the corner of his eye,” he later recalled. “And — the real clincher for his popularity with kids — parents would loathe him.”

They didn’t have Auto-Tune back then, but studio engineers had a few tricks to fix vocal imperfections. They knew how to splice together different takes, or make slight alterations in tape speed.

But when Byrnes did an audition for the label, it was bad. It was scary bad. This promising rock star had no sense of pitch. He had no range. He couldn’t even stay in rhythm with his accompanist.

No technology could fix this mess.

Record producer Avakian was no fool. During an illustrious career, he worked with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Sonny Rollins, and Keith Jarrett, among others. He had collaborated with genius, and now he had someone on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Maybe this situation is commonplace nowadays, but back in 1958 the record business believed in something called musical talent. Avakian’s bold decision to ignore that variable marks a historic moment in our culture.

Anybody else would have walked away from this looming disaster. They would have feared not just commercial failure but a tainted reputation. You don’t want to be the exec to greenlight a recording by somebody with zero musical ability.

But in a moment of brilliant insight, Avakian decided that Kookie didn’t need to sing, he could just rap. Of course, rapping wasn’t even a concept back in those days. But it sorta existed without a name. Deejays at radio stations often introduced a song by speaking in a hip tone of voice over the intro to a song.

Kookie would do the same. He would speak or rap his part, while somebody else did the actual singing. Connie Stevens, another Hollywood talent with the right look — and a slightly better voice — could handle the actual vocals.

November 26, 2025

QotD: Racism and social justice

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A definitive proof of the evil of social “science” is that — faced with the real problem of racism — it has come up with the insane idea of racist post mortem justice; demanding that living white people compensate living black people for what some dead white people did to some dead black people. If you question the logic of this then — boom — you confirm the whole crooked theory because it’s your “privilege” that blinds you to its truth. It’s like the ducking stool as a test for witchcraft. Guilty or not, you’re done for. Oh and by the way, you can’t just ignore this piffle and quietly get on with your harmless life because “white silence is violence”.

This very American problem is poisoning the world through the dominance of US popular culture and the influence of the wealthy US universities. On this side of the Pond we have our own problems. We really don’t need a whole raft of America’s too. But white privilege is such a wonderful tool for creating and exploiting division that our leftists can’t leave it be. It’s a social A-bomb just lying there waiting to be detonated.

The Left is an immoral political movement. It seeks to divide. It seeks to promote hatred between classes and other groupings in society in order to create problems that can only be “solved” by employing legions of leftists with no otherwise marketable skills to direct us to the “correct” path. The extent to which it’s already achieved its real, unstated aim of creating a well-paid cadre of apparatchiks is visible in the present pandemic. The only jobs that are safe are of those employed by the state and rewarded by reference to almost anything other than economic contribution. Those thus paid for are “essential workers.” Those who pay for them are not. Anyone who points this scam out is monstered by a leisured army of social “scientists” and their graduates in the media — also paid for by us “inessential” saps.

Judge them by the outcomes of their policies and governance and the theorists and politicians of the Left are clear failures. The squalor in which poor black Americans live is almost invariably presided over by them just as a Labour council in Britain is a promise of continued poverty for all but its apparatchiks. If the poor are your voters, the more poverty the better. If the oppressed are your voters, the more (real or imagined) oppression the merrier.

The perfect symbol of Leftist politicians in this respect is the character of Senator Clay Davis in The Wire — perhaps the greatest TV show ever made and (among many other marvellous things) a searing indictment of American racial politics. It’s a show that couldn’t be made today because it reeks of white privilege. By the way, the fact that this concept would have prevented The Wire being made is by itself a small proof that it’s a wicked one.

Tom Paine, “Checking my privilege”, The Last Ditch, 2020-06-02.

November 19, 2025

Ken Burns’ The American Revolution gets the Howard Zinn seal of approval

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander is persuaded, against his better judgement, to watch the latest Ken Burns documentary … and discovers that it’s somehow still 2018-2022 in Burns’ world:

So, I’ve watched the two episodes of Ken Burns’s documentary, The American Revolution, in spite of my stated zero desire to do so. Why? If you are not up to speed with the MSNBCification of Ken Burns over the last decade, catch up.

Anyway, as Mrs. Salamander knows more about the American Revolution than 99.7% of people out there, she insisted we watch it. I’ve been married for over three decades for a reason, so I sat down with her to watch.

FFS.

… and … it started with a land acknowledgement. ISYN.

It doesn’t get better.

By the end of episode two we’ve gotten through the Battle of Bunker Hill, yet there has been no mention of John Locke, Montesquieu, or any of the other philosophical drivers of the revolution. They have plenty of time to quote the memories of an old man about what he thought of George Washington when he ran into him when he was 8 (it wasn’t good).

Let’s pause there a bit. It is clear that they made a decision that for every good thing they say about GW in the first two episodes, they insist on finding a way to smear him with presentism. It is also clear that he really wants to do a documentary on African Americans in the Revolutionary War, but couldn’t get the funding for that. Instead there is a constant referring back to slavery and racial issues. Just overdone to the point of being obvious, given that they were, at best, tertiary issues during the war. It deserves mention, but not in this ham-fisted, patronizing manner it is being done … and done mostly to smear GW up.

The presentism and biased scholarship is not shocking if you’ve read my reports at my Substack over the years about the absolute woke-soaked state of American historical organizations such as the American Historical Association. (see my FEB 2021 Substack, “The War on (Military) History: Half a Century In” for reference.)

The smearing of GW like this is more than “balance” — it is emblematic of the presentism that makes so many modern virtue signaling tiresome — and exactly meets the low expectations I had for this documentary.

There is also the pettiness of their choices of what to comment on, and how — the smug New England perspective of the Acela Corridor that is Ken Burns’ intellectual terrarium. Just one example from the second episode: the arrival of the Virginians to support the patriot forces around Boston. Might as well have called them rednecks.

Even Mrs. Salamander, halfway through Ep. 2, had about enough of the shoehorned in identity politics of “inclusion” … as if everyone ever got over the fever of 2018-2022.

November 17, 2025

Yet another example of the Liberal focus on symptoms rather than underlying problems

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Liberals under both Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney have amply demonstrated that they care far more about appearances than achievements. The immigration crisis is merely the latest example of the government reaching for something that will look good on TV and in the newspapers rather than addressing the root cause of the problem:

Perhaps the most intractable policy disaster handed to Prime Minister Carney by the Trudeau government is the immigration file. The ugliest detail in that file is undoubtedly the astronomic increase in temporary residents (largely foreign workers, international students, and asylum seekers) – a population that expanded from 3.3% in 2018 to 7.5% in 2024. The Carney government’s solution is to limit the inflow of new temporary residents significantly, while at the same time giving permanent residency to many of the ones already on Canadian soil.

The base problem is far too many people entering the country, driving up demand for housing, overloading healthcare facilities, absorbing more and more government assistance at a time the government is running record deficits, and undercutting young Canadians for entry level jobs while youth unemployment is skyrocketing. But this “solution” will look like firm action as it will be presented by the tame media, so from the point of view of the government, it’s “mission accomplished”.

The Carney government’s first annual Immigration Levels Plan commits to “reducing Canada’s temporary population to less than 5% of the total population by the end of 2027”. To this end, Canada’s annual intake of new temporary residents will be cut from 673,650 in 2025 to 385,000 in 2026, and 370,000 in 2027 and 2028. This cut will hit international students the hardest, with annual new study permits cut in half from over 300,000 to 155,000 in 2026, and 150,000 in 2027 and 2028.

This major cut will ease the strain on Canada’s housing, healthcare, food banks, roads, and social services – a strain that is no longer denied by politicians, and is freely acknowledged across the political aisle. But, as is the case with many policies, the devil is the details. It turns out that one of the ways which the federal government intends to shrink the size of the temporary resident population is by making a large number of them permanent residents.

In the recently released 2025 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration, Immigration Minister Lena Diab says the Carney government intends to “give priority for permanent residence to temporary residents already living and settled in Canada, further reducing the number of new arrivals”.

How many temporary residents will get permanent residency under this plan is unclear, but we can extrapolate from the data we have.

The Carney government’s Immigration Levels Plan sets the annual permanent resident rate at 380,000 for the next three years – or, a total of 1,140,000. The very last Immigration Levels Plan of the doomed Trudeau government – which committed to transitioning many temporary residents to permanent residency – predicted that temporary residents would account for “more than 40% of overall permanent resident admissions in 2025”.

If the Carney government is heralding the idea of transitioning more temporary residents as a way to slow down the catastrophic population growth Canada has experienced in recent years, we can safely assume that this proportion will be at least a little bit higher than the Trudeau government’s rate. A rate of 50%, say, would mean that 570,000 temporary residents will receive permanent residency over the next three years.

See, Canadians are telling the government that there are too many temporary immigrants, so by waving a magic wand and transforming the bulk of the temporary immigrants into permanent residents, the government can pretend they’ve solved the problem. And the sycophants, fluffers, and cheerleaders in the media will laud them to the skies for their brilliant solution.

November 12, 2025

The legacy media are still fanatically pushing the “Tories in disarray” line

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s good to see that sometimes you get good value for your money. In this case, it’s the massive financial subsidies the federal government pay out to most of the Canadian legacy media outlets, so that the media ignores stories that the Liberals look bad but push the living bejesus out of anything that makes the Conservatives look bad … even if they have to distort the story almost out of recognition. Brian Lilley has the details:

I told you this would happen, the legacy media is trying to make this whole floor crossing thing into a PC versus Reform Party thing. As I broke down all of the background information that I could muster and tried to present it in a straightforward way, I said this would be a narrative of the MSM.

The reality is, the frustrations exist for a number of reasons but Pierre being too conservative is not the main issue here, it’s that they didn’t win in April. It all goes back to that and how different people interpret that loss and the leader’s response to the loss.

If you haven’t read that piece, it’s worth your time just to understand some of the nuance that you won’t find from other media.

There is no party divide …

The idea that there is still a schism on the modern Conservative Party between old PC voters or members and those that came from the Canadian Alliance or Reform side is not only false, those pushing it are showing their ignorance. The parties merged more than 20 years ago, they governed as the Conservatives for 10 years, anyone that left over this supposed divide left years ago, but the media can’t give this up and so they play into it with Chris d’Entremont on the weekend.

That was followed by Adam Chambers, the Conservative MP for Simcoe North in Ontario who pushed back against the idea that middle of the road Conservatives like him aren’t welcome in Pierre Poilievre’s party.

A hat tip to CBC Watcher on X who grabs so many of these clips and posts them.

Well done by Adam, not that it will help. This is a narrative some in the media are deciding to run with.

They will ignore that d’Entremont first ran under Andrew Scheer, hardly a Red Tory and in fact a so-con and d’Entremont was comfortable with that. Maybe because as a local French CBC outfit pointed out, d’Entremont is also on the pro-life side, the one the Liberals normally hate.

Oh … and another point on CBC’s reporting here. Remember the claim that a staffer was shoved out of the way … this is at the bottom of the CBC article that made the claim.

The Toronto Star will not be outdone …

This is a headline that I can’t believe the Toronto Star actually ran.

I’m pretty sure that columnist Althia Raj is old enough to remember all the way back to the morning of December 16, 2024. I know that was a REALLLLLLY long time ago, like, literally decades (please read that with a Valley girl upspeak).

If you don’t know that date, you will know what happened, because that is the day that Chrystia Freeland stabbed Justin Trudeau in the front, not the back. On the day that she was supposed to deliver the federal government’s fall economic statement, she issued a scathing resignation letter instead.

This of course also came after months of Liberal MPs pushing Trudeau to resign. A letter had even circulated among caucus members demanding he stepped down.

Liberal MPs couldn’t make Trudeau leave, Freeland’s resignation couldn’t make Trudeau leave, the 20 point lead the Conservatives then enjoyed couldn’t make Trudeau leave – it was Trump that did it.

All of that was wilder, had more drama than last week, but sure, tell people we haven’t seen this in decades. The column penned by Raj doesn’t mention Trudeau, it doesn’t mention Freeland, but it does want you to believe we haven’t seen this in like, FOREVER!

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